Now as far as I can tell from the Bible, the deity has infinite force at its disposal, and has knowledge of everything, at least in the present, and presumably in the past. But as long as humans have free will, not the future. Thus the deity had to destroy all humanity except Noah and his family, for being unexpectedly evil.
This leads to another issue: can the deity change the laws of logic and mathematics? To my mind, if a deity ‘wishes’ to ordain that two plus two makes five, all it can do is persuade humanity to name 2+2 as ‘five’, or something like Indo-European*phenchwe. Even then humans have the free will to take up the idea and the free will to make *phenchwe evolve into five, fünf, punch, etc. Otherwise, if the deity has the ability to change the laws of logic and mathematics, perhaps in ways incongruous and impossible, then the laws of logic attempted in this article are as of nought.
And would the deity get a First in Social Sciences? Even if it set the paper itself. Such involves summing up free-will activities in a way that is primarily of use to humans. A deity cannot know the GDP of a country at midnight of the accounting period, since even if it has knowledge of all the relevant activities, judgment of what constitutes what is a matter of free will.
Mathematicians will note that some problems can only be solved by simulation: using a machine that goes through an algorithm that simulates reality and perhaps uses trial-and-error. Perhaps the deity uses humans as such machines. If so, how can we say that the world could only be created by an intelligent being? Rather if there is an intelligent being, all it can do is give the world a shove and see what happens, which is really the opposite of what the intelligent being advocates are arguing.
So coming back to the first two questions: maybe the best answer is that perhaps being almighty isn’t as mighty as all that.
Martin Prior
